The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

I got the feeling he was looking at me on the up and up, a valid customer and not a cop. I was a white boy and maybe, like Jed, a golden customer, one with a lot of money as I’m sure Jed was. My courier took me through a pink door with the word “Boo” written on it in black marker. Sometimes you know when you shouldn’t be in a place no matter what you seek, no matter how important it is to find it, because you know that if you were in any way different in makeup and ability you could melt into the atmosphere and disappear, lose your personality, and be glad that you did. This was such a place of sin.
The first thing I noticed was the girl. She had no clothes on and she was sound asleep on a red, crushed imitation velvet couch. Somebody had strung a banner of Jimi over the couch. Color didn’t seem to matter here. The girl was white with a little nose and strawberry blonde hair. She wore a strand of pearls and when I walked by her I noticed a little blood came out of her vagina. On the same couch was a strong looking black man, also asleep, but who woke up when I walked in. He wore only shorts. I didn’t fear his noticing me because, like everybody else, he had become a ghost from whatever it was that he had taken. Others sat around. The smell of chemicals and marijuana filled the air.
“Wait here,” the kid said.
He went into a back room and disappeared. I stood there, not knowing what to do or say or where to look, with a sick feeling in my stomach. I looked from face to face to face. Four black men, two white women, two black women, three Hispanic men, one Hispanic woman, and a white baby being held by an old black woman in the corner. The old woman motioned to me, so I walked over to her.
“Don’t you do this, baby. This is my home and I don’t allow no drugs in my home. I want you out of here.”
The kid turned the corner out of the back room and his arms went wide.
“Bitch, you don’t live here anymore. Shut the fuck up and don’t mess your diapers no more.”
“You kids ruined our neighborhood.”
“You just an old, sagging bitch. Sorry bout her, man. She’s the mama of the Lady. Speaking of whom, will see you now.”
He motioned a goodbye to me by raising his fist and closing his fingers onto his thumb so that his hand formed a sort of teardrop. Then he bounced it a few times a couple inches above my own hand. I just stared at him as he walked out the door. A blue light came out of the room where the Lady was.
The Lady lay on a huge bed. She wore a white dress, but it looked blue with the black light bulb in her unshaded lamp beside her. Her arm was still wrapped with a rubber hose.
“Sit down,” she says.
I sit.
“You don’t fly do you?”
“I do.”
“No, no, honey. You don’t understand. You don’t fly for smack?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know, take it up the ass.”
“No.”
“You don’t share needles?”
“No.”
“You seem sweet then. Why don’t you come over here.”
But I couldn’t move. I knew what she wanted, but I couldn’t give it to her. I could hardly see her for the light in the room was so dark. But there was this glow in there too. Is it possible that there are little electric particles in the air, and when someone is too close to who they really are their aura, or something about thems interacts with these particles and lights up a room? I saw an orange glow coming from this woman’s head. Orangish blue, really, and it was eerie. I’d never seen anybody so blended in with their environment. It really scared me. I mean I looked around all dizzy-like thinking I just had to get out of there. I’d never seen anybody like The Lady in all of my life. I wished the black boy were back in the room to guard me from this woman’s eyes. I remembered the story of Perseus, right away, and how he wasn’t supposed to look into the eyes of Medusa. I understood. I did not look at her again, but kept my eyes on her feet where her robe ended or on the box of heroin samples laid out to her side next to the clean syringes just sitting there waiting for someone like me. I would let her think anything she wanted if she could tell me where Jed was.
“I’m looking for Jed Jones.”
“Jed’s dead, baby,” she meowed. “Jed’s not coming round here no more. We buried him yesterday. I watched him fly away. His spirit just up and flew away. That’s what I’m here for, you know. I help people get to the other side.”
“Jed’s not dead,” I said.
“I’m sorry, baby, but Jed is dead. I watched him go myself. Became an angel.”
“What does Jed look like,” I asked her.
“Jed looks like everybody who comes in here, baby. Jed is Everyman.”
“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You said Jed. I only ever knew one Jed and he was a southern white boy, if I remember right.”
“You fuckin liar. You said Jed’s dead.”
“I may be a liar, but with Jed I’m sure. Hot headed, aren’t we? I know who you are, baby. You the baby brother. Jed lay on this bed for more than two months one time. You think there any better place to go when you in the state Jed was in? I don’t count on Jed being alive any more than I count on that old woman in there being alive much longer.”
“Then where is he?”
“Little policemen all lined up in a row! Aren’t we dictatorial with our questions?”
I just shook my head and looked at her. All the fear was leaving me as I looked at her and saw her for what she was: an aging, heroin-filled whore. I looked at her like I had been looking at aging, heroin-filled whores my whole life, like all I’d done up to that point was look at aging, heroin-filled whores.
“Fuck you, you cunt,” I said and I meant it.
“Get out!” she screamed. “If you don’t know where Jed is then you don’t know Jed. What do you think the Priestess was about? You think Jed stayed on with me after he met her? Fuck Jed. He didn’t know what was good for him. He didn’t know who cared about him. You find the Priestess and you’ll find Jed.”
I had talked to the Priestess, Helen Capowitz, lead singer of Moxy Priestess, the Jewish American Princess who hadn’t done shit in the entertainment industry since the breakup of the band. We talked to her a million times when we first got panicked, but she always denied she knew anything. But she and Jed were close, and now this woman was saying something new, and I appreciated it.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I said.
“Boy, just go find Jed and bring him back. You want some?” she motioned to her stash.
“Nah, ain’t got time to screw my life up. Screwed up enough already.”

Nobody talks about the lulls. It’s the lulls that screw everything up. You got a girlfriend and you’re happy one day and the next the lulls come in like some kind of fog and take her away from you or take you away from her. One thing the lulls are good at doing is taking people away from each other for no good reasons. I hate the lulls.
I’ve got em now, though. Moxy is in town with Minnie, and Albert is off somewhere. I can see out in the yard a few chickens pecking away. My guitar’s with me here in the corner, but I’ve got too much of the lulls to pick it up. I’ve stopped doing marijuana because of Minnie. I don’t want her to go in that direction. I’ve got to be more careful than that. So I sit here at 38 looking out the window in my home state of Tennessee thinking about nothing, how nothing always creeps up on you slow and from the inside and makes you do things because, well, it’s like a noise, like a thudding you can’t hear, but as if your ears had emotions you could hear, and your emotional ears are just about blown out because of the noise, but you can hear the dog barking up the way and a few birds and you wonder whether some bastard child of fate is on its way to tell you that you’ve lost out on love or happiness as you expected you’d have it when you were young and dream-filled. I guess I’m a little down.

Moxy told me the other night that she wanted to go home to her parents for a little while. She’s going in a month or so, maybe earlier. It makes me feel like there’s something in my throat whenever Moxy hints that maybe she ain’t cut out for living on this mountain. I’m not done here. I can’t go back east. Those ghosts are too scary, and talk about emotional ears, out there I’ve got ears, emotional eyes, emotional nose for smell and a lot of fear which means a lot of crap that I just can’t handle. Moxy thinks Minnie needs to spend time with her grandparents, “let them turn her a little bit Jewish” she says. I say to her she and Minnie should go, but the fear in me, the same kind I had when my father passed away arises a little bit even though I know they’re coming back. This feeling is weird.
I’ve been alone my whole life, but this one is weird in that, one, I’m not stoned so it matters and, two, I don’t feel strong like I did. Don’t have that meanness or vitality that I had when I was younger. Don’t feel like Superman anymore. Feel like there’s cryptonite hidden somewhere on the ranch and I don’t know where it is and whenever I think I want to go find it to go get rid of it I stop because I know it will make me even weaker to go that way. So I figure the cryptonite is just the other side of the cliff, hung up on a bush, not too far and not too close, making me tired, but not too tired, but also making it so that I can’t reach out to nothing. I can’t reach out to Moxy in town by driving down there. I can’t reach out to my mama or my brother whose always ready to talk to me about Petals, but since I’m on Coconut Jerk Chicken, a happy song full of dancing teenage girls who work at a margarita bar in California, which was the same place I once ended up in an emergency ward for shooting too much smack into my arms, I find that I’m hiding even from him just like that hamster of his whose cage just gets bigger and bigger and bigger thanks to Habitrail and a brother who truly believes, as does Minnie, that life is just a hamster cage. Seems Albert’s making his as comfortable as possible too. I tell Moxy I want to get a hamster and she just looks at me like I’m crazy and that just makes me sadder because I think she doesn’t understand me anymore.
I’m not like Albert though. I don’t know how to fantasize my way out of the hamster cage. When I look outside I see nothing but wind in the trees and earth. I’m stuck on this mountain, rooted you might say and it seems that that’s okay. There’s a lot to think about. There are a lot of memories to re-hash, things to think about that I did a long time ago that might still somehow have lingering effects, long fingers picking at my family life today. I don’t know what a relationship with my mama would have been like today if I hadn’t gotten so fucked up back then. We have a pretty good one. She likes that I’m back and I do too. She loves Minnie. Loves her. You can’t help but love Minnie, with those brown eyes of her and that cap Moxy gave her that makes her look so cute. But there hasn’t been that spark in my mama’s eye that I wished I could return to it. Sometimes life makes you old and when you’re old others see you and if they’re old then they recognize the one thing they don’t want to see, so they stop wanting to see you, getting it all mixed up in their heads.
But the fact of the matter is that old is all a matter of the mind to hash out. Thirty-eight ain’t nothing to eighty-three, but don’t tell that to a 38 year old watching his hairline fall back into oblivion. We don’t any of us really know what we’re doing here on this earth. Some of us, like Albert, get caught up in the idea that we can know the unknowable. But there’s always a little black space of shadow there where we can’t see nothing good.
So when Albert saves the world for all the love he wants there to be, thinking that’s something worthy of shooting for, just after I say “he’s right,” I’ll say take a break Albert there’s more wars coming that you’ll never ever know about. But I’d rather go out of this world thinking that I was saying something good instead of something bad. Because if there is a heaven then I’d like to go. If there’s not I don’t want to be sitting around down here telling people there isn’t even if there isn’t because one or two of those people might really need to believe that there is. And who am I to say?
We’ve all got our endeavors. We all got the times we get pissed off at the ones we love most or we get tired of them and we look around at the world and everything we see suddenly is something we wish we were having, but don’t. Sometimes I want to run away with one of them little girls down there in town, maybe a nice 20-year-old blonde or something, thinking that Moxy isn’t doing it for me anymore. But then I take a break, used to light up some Bob Hope, now I just go for walks and listen to the streams.
I heard a story out here when I was a kid, some other kid named Bobby something or other told it. He said that there were three old witches that lived in a cabin not far from here, right by Brierson Brook. One night his elders, because this happened a long time ago, while out shooting for quail, heard something. They all stopped what they were doing and listened and just over the sound of the water of the brook you could hear it, a distinct and chaotic cackling. This cackling was unlike anything any of them had ever heard and they brought their weapons close to their bodies while they slowly investigated. They came around a corner and just over a little cliff was a house, the ladies house where three sisters lived, all three of which were, supposedly, bona fide witches.
I only tell this story because It always reminded me a little bit about what I thought was inside every woman I ever knew and that made me scared of ’em a little bit. Women to me always seemed like they had that something in their eye which would allow them to protect themselves in a way that I can’t even begin to fathom. The closest I can come to describe it is by calling it witchcraft, but even a young girl has got it somehow, even Minnie has got it. It’s a way of looking at you and not saying nothing, but letting you know that the answer is there and obvious, but only a woman can see it.
To this day I don’t know what it means that these women can see things I can’t. I do believe, though, that it has something to do with their protection. It’s the truest image of woman I’ve ever conceived. Moxy Priestess is the epitome, but the Priestess, even though she sounds witchy, wasn’t all that witchy. The only hocus pocus we ever tried was mixing narcotics. Don’t believe we ever chanted anything out of the way of pass this or pass that category of pill or blow or whatever. But let me finish the story. These guys went up to the door because they were curious. The door was one of those glass kinds where you can see in through a little bit of a rainbow shaped window. The witches were howling now as though they knew these men were out there. If it had been me I would have been out of there a long time ago which is another reason I think this story was made up. But anyway, this kid told us that these witches were in their kitchen cackling and cackling and sitting up in a pot plain as day on the table was a little girl without any clothes waiting to get cooked. The kid said they said they all ran away thinking they ate that kid. I just think this is the funniest thing I ever heard.
Annabelle was always running off said the reports down at the museum. She had light brown hair and loved animals and people and they even say that she would put on a little civil war era rock and roll show for everybody if her mother asked her to. If there was a little girl I have no doubt that little girl was Annabelle. She’d probably strolled into their yard all dirty and they took her in and cleaned her up and fed her before taking her home. I don’t imagine anybody up here back then wouldn’t have known their neighbor to some degree.
But the story is that the witches ate her, that she was in a steaming pot and the witches danced around her. That’s a good one to keep going for awhile longer because it lends something else to the power, the same power that the Priestess had, namely, the power of the woman to do the most atrocious thing imaginable or, to be more concise, to let the world think she’s capable of it when she’s really no more capable than me or any other man I’ve ever met. I think we’re all equally capable of good or evil and what you’ve got between your legs don’t matter. I just find this little mechanism for protection the Lord gives to the women of the world ingenious.

My husband was a good man. He gave me Jed back in the 60s. Albert came along ten years later. I have always tried to be a good mother. I haven’t always succeeded. When Tom died in 1970, just before filling me with what would become Albert who we named after his father as planned, I thought that I would always have a man. Well, I did. I had two men after he died. Jedediah which was my father’s name and Albert.
But then Jed left us when he was 17. I’m not angry at my boy. He came back eventually as I hoped he would. Albert brought him back. There is so much love in the heart of that younger child for the older that I trusted him when he said he was going to find him. I trusted that he would be okay. Albert’s my baby, but he’s grown up possibly better and stronger than most any man I’ve ever met. Albert is a big boy and very smart, much smarter than his mother. If I have any intelligence about me at all its in the way that I understand the meaning of color. I’m a painter. I painted Albert’s poster for his play. I wish him the best of luck.
When he was in New York he told me he had a meeting with Andrew Lloyd Webber, as though I didn’t know who he was. I knew he didn’t have a meeting with Andrew Lloyd Webber. But he was out looking for Jed when everybody in the world thought Jed was dead even me. And he found him and for doing that he became my hero and Jed’s and I think even Helen’s to some degree. The baby loves him just because she does.
I remember a mule that Jed owned after he moved back here to his house on Annabelle’s Mountain. Teardrop he named it. Well that mule got stolen or something or lost and finally found its way home to Jed and Helen’s, but not until after it went through some horrible, horrible conditions on that mountain. I saw that mule and it was almost dead. It lay on its side for a week and we called the doctor in and he gave it a good chance of living and it did. Albert’s a lot like that mule. I thank God every day for Albert because without Albert I never would have believed that Jed wasn’t dead. When I saw Jed for the first time in so many years, he was holding a baby in his arms. Of course it was Minnie. Oh, I laugh when I think about her, that baby, born in New Jersey but who has spent most of her life on Annabelle’s Mountain. We go up there a lot because its so pretty, as much as we can, me and Albert, Albert more. I like to set up my easel right up there where they call it Angel’s Peak and do landscapes. I did that portrait of Diana for Albert, but I really love landscapes and I’ve got a whole lot of them in my house hanging on the walls and Jed’s got a lot of them on his walls and Albert just keeps the one of Diana in his room.
Minnie is cute as a button. She looks a lot like Jed. Jed just about broke my heart. When he left he put a needle in his arm to say goodbye. I could have died from grief just then, but I didn’t. I remember when Tom, well, I guess it was the last time I spoke to Tom… He told me that my paintings were just getting prettier, just like me. Then he went off to work and not three days later, after a fishing trip with Jed, a man was beating his wife up and Tom helped her and beat up that man and then that man came back and he shot Tom and he shot the girl, too, but only the girl lived.
That man, Steve Merrick, is still in jail for killing Tom and he ain’t never getting out. I don’t hate him, but it fills me with grief to think about him, I mean, I never wanted anybody else and have never been with anybody else and then the way it effected my oldest, Jed. Sometimes I think God sent Albert down like a modern Moses to pick up the pieces of our lives that shattered because Steve Merrick killed the father of my boys. My husband was an extraordinarily good man. It’s a shame really now that he was such a good man because Jed had been highly influenced by his goodness more than anything else. Jed shut up like a clam after Tom was killed. He didn’t talk to nobody. He just played Tom’s guitar, but he played it in a way that was different. I used to watch him play that guitar and it almost made me cry. He would linger down low on those notes as if he were trying to juice out colors or something and not just sound. I painted that boy playing that guitar. I’ve got over twenty guitar pictures in my basement right now of Jed playing those guitars and a few of Albert listening until Jed got too old to have me look at him play and just went off to his room, sometimes with his little brother trailing behind and him not really seeming to mind that much which is ultimately what I think saved his life because I don’t think I had enough male energy in me to give to Jed and I think he took some of it from Albert’s just being there.
He wasn’t going nowhere, Jed. He was disappearing into his music, but I couldn’t take away his guitar. What was a mother to do? I didn’t want no other man, but I tried briefly, but it didn’t work out. Jed just hated him and that was only because the man was really worth hating. He was a jerk. A drinker. I stayed with Rusty almost a year and its the only year in my life that I truly regret living, I mean living, I mean actually being alive.
Jed was thirteen. I’ve apologized to him for it, but by then he was already drinking and the guitar made him cool to girls so, well, I think he lost his virginity right around then. I can’t help but feel that I am the world’s worst mother. I can’t help it, but deep down I somehow know its not true. Albert used to be the only thing in the world that kept me alive it seemed. I even started smoking pot a little bit to see if I could understand Jed, who started going to his room every day, I mean, every goddamned day stoned until I said he could just smoke it in there. Albert told me he once got stoned with him, but he’d never, honestly, never done it again. I don’t know if I can believe that, but I do know that Albert isn’t a drug addict and Albert is truly an artist. I don’t know if he got that from Jed or from me. He never knew his father. I’ll never know. It seems Albert is the greatest artist of all of us in his own way because Albert’s always been the peacemaker. I don’t know if he can write or not like he says he can like he’s some kind of hero. I imagine most people would say that Jed’s got the artist’s soul and I suspect nobody has ever really looked seriously at my own artwork. All I know is that Albert brought Jed back to me and in so doing he gave me Minnie and Helen and I’m obliged to him for those things.
But I worry about Albert. Jed’s got a family. Albert lives in the back of the house with his computer and his hamster. He had a girlfriend for a long time, but she broke with him because he got too crazy about his rock operas. Mmmm. I don’t know. Sometimes I just don’t know. Jed is back home now and everything is alright, but it doesn’t mean that I understand anything. I don’t know why Tom had to die and I know that I should try to be happier than I am, but I can’t seem to do it. At least not well. I go to my clubs and my classes and my job which is all good for me, but I can’t seem to shake this feeling of nothingness inside of me given to me by a Lord who provides all needs and some wants, but seems to do it in a manner too slow for me as I get older and start to understand what it means to be a matron, as I lose forever, watch as the years take them, the workings of my innards that could make me a mother once again. Yeah, I remember that mule just wanting to get home and sometimes it seems to me that I’m like that mule. Sometimes when I get so sad that I don’t want to go on any further I think about how that mule made it home, how that mule simply made it home because that’s where he wanted to be and nowhere else. Albert’s like that too and so is Jed and so is Helen in some way. Minnie’s an angel yet, a little angel, she’s new and when I think of her I think about when Jed was new and then Albert and it makes me want to remember when my marriage with Tom was new and how, even further back, my life as a girl was new, with a new body and pretty hair and smooth skin and that makes me want to remember my own mama and daddy and how new they were when they were young, much younger than I am now, with me and my sisters in town the both of whom have moved away to Nashville and yet I can’t go any further than that.
And that’s what makes me sad. I can’t stay long with my memories anymore. I used to dream of having Jed back with me, but now that he’s back I have nobody else to dream for, to long for to return except for myself in a way I can never be again. Tom’s dead. I thank God that Albert is still here, but I can feel it. He’s moving soon. That boy’s got big dreams and I think he’s got talent too like he’s always telling everybody. I think Albert will be good in Hollywood. I think he’ll just go wherever Petals takes him.
So I guess my hopes are the same as they were after Tom died, that Jed will take care of us, won’t let us fall away like he did. Now that he’s back, Jed must return to what he was: the man of the house. I thank God he lived long enough to have Minnie. I love my boys very much.

I became a dot at 7:32 a.m. I watched the dot enter a rectangle in Tennessee and move slowly across the nation, slowly, through green fields, by stores and lives totally unaffected by Jedediah Jones, but probably not untouched by Moxy Priestess. I watched the dot get off of the rectangle and move through a sea of other dots as if in a maze. The dot bumped and moved, bumped and moved forward, never stopping once to consider its dotness. Slowly the world began to become more real to the dot.
Night fell and the dot entered a large, cement square and disappeared. When the sun arose, the dot went outside of the huge square and joined other moving dots. Moving was good. All the dots agreed. Moving was all anybody had in this city. When the dot became a non-dot was three days later, three days, the same number of days that it took Jesus to climb his way out of hell to get to heaven.
Slit was a fat black man I met in a club called Sizzle in Harlem. He was like a black Michelin tire man. He came at you like he was going to run you over, but he stopped moving in that way when the bartender explained to him that I was the brother of Jed Jones.
“Shiiiiit, you da brotha a ol’ Jed? Don’t you know Jed dead, baby?”
He turned around and said “shiiiiit” again, then laughed, looking at me a little bit as I disappeared inside myself completely, because I believed him for that moment utterly. After watching me looking like this he said, “Now don’t go believin’ everything you hear me say, boy.”
“Well, where is he then?” I asked, mad he was playing with me.
“Jed’s been gone from this neighborhood, three, four years. Dat boy was hittin’ her hard, too. He’d take it any way he could get it. Say he was a rock and roll star, but Jed was nothin but a junkie.”
“You don’t know where he is then?”
Slit lost his humor.
“I told you that, boy, now get the fuck outta here and quit policing me.”
I turned and was almost out the door when Slit spoke.
“555-4298,” he said.
I went to a pay phone just outside the bar and dropped in a quarter and a dime. No answer, busy signal. Everybody on the street was black, but they didn’t notice me. I tried again and stood by the phone for awhile, then again, but it stayed busy. Night was falling. I had to go.
The dot went underground and then came up into night. It found its way back to the huge cement square and didn’t re-appear until daylight.
I called every half hour from the phone in my room that night, but it stayed busy all night long. The next day I tried the number again with no luck. I went back to Sizzle looking for the fat man Slit, but he was gone, and nobody would say how to reach him. When I stepped outside I didn’t care anymore. I had no leads, had been in the city four days and had shit. I roamed and talked to pimps and doper sellers and hookers and musicians and drummers in Washington Square. A few remembered Jed from the record stores. I went back to Sizzle and stood around. I figured since Slit knew him then there might be others in the neighborhood who did too. I walked right up to a black kid standing by an alleyway, obviously waiting to sell some dope or hookers or something. I didn’t care. All the better for what I wanted.
“I want some smack,” I told him.
“I wouldn’t know about dat, man,” he said.
I pulled out my wallet, fat with cash, and flashed it to him. I made sure he saw the knife I kept tight in my belt in case of emergency.
“Well, motha fucka might be talkin the right language to somebody round here. I’m just going my way. Wanna hang out?”
“Sure,” I said.
So I follow him down the street. He saying “hi” to everybody he meets. Whassup. Whassup. Yo. Homeboy. Yo. Whassup, nigger. Whassup. Yo.
Me, a ghost, followed this ghost. The other ghosts passed through each other on the way to nowhere and entered squares and rectangles, making no changes to the walls they passed through by doing so. I walked three floors up some dark, dank, urine- smelling stairs, following the the ghost who had taken to silence and floating. I stayed a good ten feet behind him. I think he respected that opinion, especially knowing I carried a knife that I made damn sure he believed I would use. I didn’t give a fuck. I was going to find Jed.